Birthday Cake

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and you can't bake a cake without laying them! Any chicken will tell you that, and it is at a chicken farm that The Magic of Making Birthday Cake begins. The farm is famous for its blue eggs, produced by Old Cotswold Legbars, a delightful breed of chicken popular with lovers of oddly coloured shells.

The chickens are free range, and their little hen houses are so clean that our camera was able to go inside to see just what a chicken sees when the farmer comes to steal her eggs!

After egg laying, we visit the lovely ladies of the cake factory, who use hundreds of the things as they cheerfully whisk and beat their way towards a fine and chocolatey mix!

While the cake bakes in the oven, we are treated to a TV chef's speedy demonstration of just a few of the many egg based dishes a cook can turn out. Omelets and meringues are among her triumphs, the latter giving the narrator an excellent excuse to talk about the mysterious properties of long protein molecules!

Back in the factory (well, it's more like a giant kitchen to be honest), the cake ladies fetch their first bake from the oven. Thanks to the wonders of self-raising flour the cake has risen, and is just perfect for icing. As the icing is skilfully applied, we hear the extraordinary secret of its smoothness. Apparently it all depends on crystals scraped from the inside of old wine barrels - who on Earth worked that one out!?

After a quick visit to a birthday party, we make a final return visit to the farm to thank the chickens. But despite the narrator's reassurance that the chickens are really very friendly, the film appears to show them attacking each other! Must be all the eggsitement!